Back from the annual week or so down in France (apologies for the absence of posts - Internet connection is haphazard at best).

A few interesting items were waiting on the door mat, one of which being Out To Lunch's new slim volume on William Blake. A guaranteed provocation right from the start: I haven't seen Ben in several years but that's quite a frightening author photo.

After six hours of driving I'm not in the mood right now, but a quick flip through suggests this is going to be fun - many of the usual suspects (Marx, Zappa, Prynne, Joyce), intense pen and ink bio-cosmorphic drawings, and maybe some Blake in there, too.

Via Ron Silliman's blog I gather there's been some rumpus about this book - Ben and Sean Bonney going head to head as to who's the truly revolutionary. It's the sort of in-fighting that I remember in the 90s and the journal Parataxis - precisely what Cambridge English studies seems to thrive on.

Meanwhile I've been trying to make progress in Paradise Lost (both an obligation due to work and a feeling that my 48 year-old self should see what my callow 19 year-old youth missed reading all-too hastily for the weekly essay). Perhaps not the best choice of holiday reading given the multitude of distractions and I'm currently only half way through Book IV. It's slow going although not through lack of interest. I find I spend a lot of time dreaming in and around the annotations and the density of the language. Exactly what I used to find so frustrating is now perhaps the greatest pleasure. A Paradise Discovered.